When you sit down and just listen, without doubt, or fear, without judgment or pride, to your customers, to your coworkers and to yourself something wonderful happens. Something is born. A weave of ideas and aspirations that, if nurtured and guided, can become an innovation that could potentially change the world.
I have built a career helping others see the potential in themselves to do something new, something authentic. I have helped others create 100’s of patent applications and have over a dozen patents and trade secrets to my own name. And, from these efforts, I learned a simple truth, if you want to create something new you need to look beyond yourself, and to do that you need to listen.
Often today we hero-worship those who embody arrogance in the name of innovation when, in reality, these are marketing constructs of people. To create we must look past the media version of a creator and see the creator in our mist, the true drivers of innovation who quietly listen to needs and craft new solutions. There are endless possibilities when I just listen but when hubris takes over the world narrows to what is within my single mind.